Had a chat with a retired A&P at the airport diner yesterday that really got me thinking about how we test gear.

He was telling me about a time in the 90s when his whole shop spent two days trying to find a fault in a nav system. Turns out their test set was out of cal by a tiny bit, just enough to give false readings. He said, 'We were so sure the box was bad, we never thought to question the tester.' It hit different because I just spent a morning chasing a weird voltage drop on a comm radio, and my first thought was the LRU, not my multimeter. Made me realize I almost never send my personal tools out for calibration, just the shop's official stuff. How often do you guys actually check your own meters and testers? Got a schedule or just wait for something to feel off?

3 comments

3 Comments

emery2902mo ago

Heard a buddy fried a board trusting his old meter.

rowanhernandez2mo ago

Yeah, my old meter lied to me once too and it cost me a whole PSU, lol.

adams.uma2mo ago

My buddy Mark lost his whole gaming rig last year. His cheap meter read 12.3 volts on the 12V rail, so he thought he was safe. Turned out it was actually spiking past 14 under load. Fried the motherboard, the GPU, everything. He was so mad he threw that meter in the trash.